As discussed in the parent application, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,738,760, businesses and institutions today maintain massive volumes of electronic and paper data. These entities are often called on to sift through and discover relevant data, a process that is extremely time-consuming, labor-intensive, and expensive.
For example, discovery requests during litigation can cause various problems for the parties with respect to hard copies, computer databases, and archives. For the party making discovery requests, the primary problems are (i) the enormous amount of data to be sifted through resulting from broad discovery requests and (ii) the failure to discover broadly distributed information resulting from narrow discovery requests. For parties responding to discovery requests, the primary problems are (i) the enormous amounts of data which must be kept and/or turned over as a result of the litigation and (ii) the unintended production of new discoverable material.
Problems can also arise before a complaint is filed. As soon as one-party knows there is a potential dispute, that party will want to search its own records and interview its employees to assess risk and find evidence of problematic documents. The party will also want to send a document preservation letter to the other side early in the process.
Once a complaint is filed, the litigant is under a duty to preserve what it knows, or reasonably should know, is relevant in the action, is reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence, is reasonably likely to be requested during discovery, and/or is the subject of a pending request.
On the response side, is now fairly clear that automatic electronic document destruction cannot continue after the responding company receives discovery requests, subpoenas or other similar legal process. On the other hand, the company does not want full-scale disruption of its data retention policy.
Beyond the management of old archival documents, a substantial problem exists in the area of newly created data. Once litigation is filed, does every e-mail created after the lawsuit become fair game? The famous Microsoft anti-trust case seems to indicate that the answer is “yes.” There is currently no software system that helps a company manage the creation of new, responsive and potentially embarrassing data.
Likewise, similar situations occur with respect to creation, maintenance, and recovery of information relevant to other activity, such as, but not limited to, legal issues like regulatory compliance (e.g., EEO, EPA, FTC, etc.), mergers & acquisitions (liabilities, indemnification, etc.), due diligence inquiries, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the legislative and political processes, homeland security and criminal law enforcement.
However, some litigation and enforcement problems not directly addressed by U.S. Pat. No. 6,738,760 include the issue of identifying relevant data for impeaching witnesses deponents or other speakers, or leading the user to other data closely related to the false statements, as well as the issue of determining when it is highly likely that a witness or deponent is making a false statement subject to impeachment. Indeed, when the speaker makes a false statement, it is essential to identify the documents that relate to the false statement, both for impeachment purposes and for further probing of other lines of inquiry. The prior art lacks any means for identifying training material for the AI technology of U.S. Pat. No. 6,738,760 to address potentially false statements for any other reason, such as for regulatory compliance, background checks or law enforcement.
A known means for determining when it is highly likely that a subject is making a false statement is a voice stress analyzer. The voice stress analyzer first came into being in the law enforcement arena during the early 1970's through research and development by private individuals and the U.S. Army. Originally developed in the form of the Psychological Stress Evaluator (PSE), its purpose was to graphically display stress in the voice of a speaker when asked relevant questions.
Human speech is generated by the vocal cords and by turbulence as expelled air moves through the vocal tract creating a resonance of the cavities in the head, the throat, the lungs, the mouth, the nose, and the sinus cavities. Previous experiments show three types of voice-change as a result of stress. The first of these usually manifests itself in audible perceptible changes in speaking rate, volume, voice tremor, spacing between syllables, and fundamental pitch or frequency of the voice. The second type of voice change is not discernible to the human ear, but is an apparently unconscious manifestation of the slight tensing of the vocal cords under even minor stress, resulting in a dampening of selected frequency variations. When graphically portrayed, the difference is readily discernible between unstressed or normal vocalization and vocalization under mild stress, attempts to deceive, or adverse attitudes. These patterns have held true over a wide range of human voices of both sexes, at various ages, and under various situational conditions. The third is an infrasonic, or subsonic, frequency modulation which is present, in some degree, in both the vocal cord sounds and in the formant sounds. This signal is typically between 8 and 12 Hz. Accordingly, it is not audible to the human ear. Due to the fact that this characteristic constitutes frequency modulation, as distinguished from amplitude modulation, it is not directly discernible on time-base/amplitude chart recordings. However, this infrasonic signal, sometimes referred to as “micro-tremors,” is one of the more significant voice indicators of psychological stress and it is theorized that this stress can be indicative of a false statement.
Software tools for this type of voice stress analysis are available for use with personal computers. One such tool is the open source “LiarLiar” tool available under the GNU public license from http://liarliar.sourceforge.net/
There are currently many other voice stress analyzers (VSA) on the market today. The major VSA vendors market their products on a laptop with specific software, while few are sold as an electronic device with the software embedded on its chips. Some examples are:                Psychological Stress Evaluator (PSE), Dektor Counterintelligence and Security, Inc.        Lantern, The Diogenes Group, Inc.        Vericator, Trustech Ltd. Integritek Systems Inc.        Computerized Voice Stress Analyzer (CVSA™), National Institute for Truth Verification (NITV)        VSA Mark 1000, CCS International Inc.        VSA-15, CCS International Inc.        Xandi Electronics (markets a kit)        
Other known means to analyze statements for truth or falsity include the use of standard polygraph “lie detection” techniques and the use of humans skilled in the art of detecting lies, such as “Truth Wizards” identified through screening by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco.